Google’s Copyright Policy Spawns Mega-Meta Art From China

The Google Art Project allows art enthusiasts to visit distant museums online by scanning them with the same 15-lens camera rigs used by Google Street View. Due to copyright restrictions, however, certain paintings needed to be blurred, just like faces are in GSV.

British artist Phil Thompson was intrigued by the foggy interruptions. His project Copyrights is his exploration of Google’s grand, utopian exercise in bringing culture to the masses. For it, Thompson makes screen grabs of the blurred images in his browser window, sends them to the Dafen Oil Painting Village in China (a company that makes acrylic paintings of absolutely anything to order) and then exhibits those works in a gallery.

The Google Art Project currently displays over 45,000 artworks by nearly 10,000 artists across 261 collections. It allows anyone to explore the halls of art meccas such as the Louvre and Tate Modern and take in their favorite Bruce Nauman or Caravaggio.

However, despite the hundreds of official partnerships Google has made with institutions, the Google Art Project must blur artworks that are copyright protected. Usually, it’s works that are not in institutions’ permanent collections that are hazed. Copyrights is meant to ask questions about the commodification and global reach of art as it is pushed through our digital lives.

“I managed to find out what the original works were behind some of the blurs, but ultimately decided that the piece worked better without revealing what the originals are,” he says. “I wanted the new blurred images to exist as things in themselves.”

Copyrights is not poking fun at Google’s Achilles’ heel; it’s an investigation into the images at our fingertips. Born in 1988, Thompson explains that he’s spent most of his life on the internet and is a huge fan of Google’s all-seeing exercises to map and see the world.

“The internet provides a huge amount of material which otherwise would be unattainable to most people,” he says. “It has led to a lot of creativity — whether it is with memes or highly skilled photoshop jobs — everyone is now able to create and edit images.”

Artists have found rich content amid Google’s shifting representations. Thompson particularly appreciates interventions that “that flips between virtual and real in order to investigate how they intertwine” such as art by Aram Bartholl, Andreas Rutkauskus and Andrew Norman Wilson’s play within Google Books, ScanOps.

The blurred artworks in the Google Art Project look like glitches, but exist due to pragmatic legal decisions and stem from Google’s immersive method of documenting museum and gallery spaces.

“The way in which the user interacts with the art works [of the Google Art Project] is quite unusual. Instead of presenting the art works as standard online images, Google attempts to recreate the act of walking through the gallery by using the same technology as Google Street View. This attempt at trying to make the experience more ‘real,’ in fact makes it seem even more strange.”

The role that anonymous Chinese painters had in the creation of Copyrights is significant and Google’s relationship with China and issues of internet freedom fascinate Thompson. He has worked in China both with and without a VPN channel and found the contrast between available websites is vast.

“Google’s position in China has been greatly compromised, especially recently, given their decision to stop displaying warning messages about censorship,” explains Thompson. “Obviously the paintings in the Copyrights series are censored through the Art Project program itself. However, by getting the works painted in China the aim was to reflect the censorship of Google itself within China.”

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